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Album Leaf of Flowers and Insects, bequest of the Hofer Collection of the Arts of Asia, 1985.904.6
Our new cicada overlords have officially arrived.
You might be using Cicada Safari to track Brood X, which appears to be slowly emerging from the earth in the U.S. all the way from Florida to Michigan. But cicadas are global citizens. In China, the critters have long been symbolically significant.
"Cicadas are actually quite prominent in Chinese literature, art and culture," says Haiyan Lee, a professor of east Asian languages and cultures and of comparative literature at Stanford University. They're even part of military strategy, she adds. Among the legendary